A serious dispute is brewing in the world of ebooks, pitting publishers and Apple against giant online retailer Amazon. A significant part of the appeal of ebooks is that they are (or should be) much cheaper than printed editions. In the publishing world, royalties paid to the author typically represent just 10% of the retail price. Both publishers and retailers take their cut. Printing is usually 30%, and then there are warehousing and shipping costs.

DRM may not be popular, but is there a better way to curb piracy? ppl may point to the music industry, musicians can still make money through concerts. how in the world are the writers going to make a living if ppl start sharing their unencrypted books?

Amazon has an ulterior motives for selling ebooks for $10, it is establishing the kindle as a platform and trying to corner the market. I say, let the free market decide how much ebooks should cost.

Yes! Price the product at a fair market value where the vast majority of people view it a a reasonable price and won't go through the hassle of pirating.

Remember when VHS's were new technology? The movie companies charged $100 or more for a movie. Gues what happened? Almost no one purchased them and everyone pirated movies. When Top Gun came out for $24.99 (I think if I remember correctly), it shattered that pricing model. All new movies started coming out at reasonable prices and piracy almost vanished.

You will never completely get rid of piracy, as some people will pirate just because they can, and others will because they can't even afford the much lower prices. These are not lost sales however, because these people would not purchase your product regardless of the price.

Songs are being sold for a dollar apiece. what do you think "fair value" for an unencrypted ebook should be, when the same book is available for free a few more clicks away? Some people will pay, but unless the ebook is priced wayyyy below $10, most people will choose to pirate.

Again,not rocket science.

Musicians can live off tour revenues, writers cannot. Real life is not as simple as you would like it to be.

Apparently you don't read many paper books: unless they come in an easy to disassemble 3 ring binder, you'd need to take out each page and copy it, put it back in the original book, and then bind the copy, which is likely not going to be the same size, possibly larger or smaller, and if the original book is color, it'd be a fortune to do a color copy of a whole book, unless it's just spot colors here and there, where you then have the complication of making most of the copy on black and white, and then doing those parts in color. Oh, and the new xerox copied book will likely be made of lower quality paper, the toner is more likely to rub off, etc. so what you ask only remotely makes sense if your time has no value, you like a messy process, and aren't afraid of destroying the original book, and you don't care about the fully assembled result's usability.

Meanwhile, an eBook by comparison can be copied via a command line or a nice GUI, and zero quality is lost in the process, and it isn't made anymore difficult for usability, either, if it is a true bitwise copy, and it would only take a few seconds and presence of mind.

Now, will eBooks take out authors and publishing companies, one way or the other, based on having DRM or not, and all the pricing pressures? We shall see! But your question, how did they survive xerox machines, is clearly that of someone that hasn't thought things through very well: other than expense, it's just too darn much hassle for most people, and takes too long to accomplish, and the resulting copy quality is rarely as good as the original, when, for most books, most people would work for a shorter time to pay for a legit copy rather than the effort and time they'd need to put into getting a xerox copy.